The ‘Development’ Discourse in Multilateral Trade Lawmaking

Abstract

The impact of the idea of 'development' in multilateral trade lawmaking is often reduced to the principle of 'special and differential treatment', which exempts developing countries from certain obligations imposed by the trade regime. The article shows that 'development' has always presented a much wider challenge to the vision of the trade regime championed by the major trading nations. The development discourse has conceived the trade regime's historical significance, the regime's aims, and the relationships among its members in ways that were often fundamentally at odds with the conception preferred by most developed countries. The article explores how the development discourse has informed lawmaking initiatives by developing countries throughout the history of the trade regime. While not all of these initiatives were successful or necessarily fruitful, they show that the pursuit of development in trade lawmaking has always been more than an effort to seek exemption from trade rules.

The Unmaking of Special Rights

“…Contestation -both discursively and in negotiation practices -has meant that the system of special rights is gradually changing. Our conceptualization of special rights as social norms (see Chapter 1) thus sets our findings apart from legal scholarship: while they emphasize individualization as the main trend in the legal evolution of SDT (Pauwelyn 2013;Lamp 2017), the fragmentation we observe signals more diverse types of unmaking.…”

“…Existing scholarship on changing norms of differential treatment as a global ordering principle remains scarce and is often confined to legal perspectives (Ukpe and Khorana 2021;Cullet 2016;Rajamani 2006). When changes in systems of differential treatment have been examined, studies tend to remain issue-area-specific with a primary focus on the climate, or environmental and trade regimes (Pauwelyn 2013;Lamp 2017;Farias and Roger 2023;Castro and Kammerer 2021;Weinhardt and Schöfer 2022;Dingwerth 2023). What does our comparative perspective that comprised climate, trade, and global health financing add to existing scholarship?…”

A Challenge to the Discourse of Development or Development Done Differently: The Discourse of Experts in the WTO Agreement on Trade Facilitation

“…As the meeting place for like-minded regulators, Cho suggests that the nature of discourse in the WTO is more participatory and less conflictual, best represented by descriptions of collaborative peer review framed by the normative discourse of WTO rules, which are formally codified into the acquis -the official and documented institutional records -of the organization (Cho, 2014, p. 694). At the same time, the consultative and participatory nature of WTO discourse described by Cho "opens spaces for less powerful actors to articulate their positions" (Cho, 2014, p. 702) through more peer-based relationships of like-minded regulators, versus those of experts and beneficiaries, despite Lamp's (2017) suggestion that the categories of "developing" and "least developed" remain wellestablished in the discourse of the WTO (Lamp, 2017, p. 497).…”

“…The Doha Development Agenda and the TFA Lamp (2017) highlights a contested interconnection between trade and the discourse of development and underdevelopment dating to the late 1940s. These first post-war decades, Lamp (2017) argues, were formative in developing a discourse of "developed" and "underdeveloped" within the trade sector, where the divergent export promotion and import substitution interests of newly independent post-colonial states conflicted with the open trade interests of developed countries, who sought to maintain their position of dominance in the global economic system (Lamp, 2017, p. 483). Consequently, developing countries remained suspicious of the trade and development agenda.…”